Remember: Since 1990, Wolfgang Benz has been head of the only continental European research center on anti-Semitism, the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA), based at Technical University in Berlin.

He is supposed to analyze anti-Semitism, both historical and contemporary. But he prefers to equate anti-Semitism with “Islamophobia.” (…)

Benz was also criticized last year after it was revealed that he earned his PhD in 1968 under the auspices of Prof. Karl Bosl, who had been on the payroll of the Schutzstaffel (SS) during Nazi Germany. Bosl was a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the Stormtroopers (SA), among other National Socialist organizations. After 1945, he was still committed to supporting former leading Nazis and edited volumes in honor of individuals like Theodor Mayer and Karl Alexander von Müller.

Benz himself honored Bosl in 1983 and 1988, and said in 2010 at an event in the Bavarian city of Erlangen that Bosl “was not a Nazi.” In fact, Bosl even equated the Holocaust with the expulsion of the Germans from the East after 1945 in a lecture in front of a right-wing extremist group called Witikobund in 1964.

While Benz is silent about the Nazi legacy of his PhD advisor, he is eager to denounce critics of anti-Semitism and Islamic jihad.